About the Book
Death of the Org Chart is a Handbook, a Guidebook, a How To Book. We will teach you how to think about your organizational structure and org chart through a different lens, from a modern perspective. You will learn how to unravel and organize the structural complexities inherent in your modern day organization. It is for people who are not happy with the status quo, who want to become organizational structure and design experts.The complexity of modern organizations can no longer be captured in your 20th century Org Chart, it requires a new thinking approach and a new technology to capture this thinking. Frustrated CEO's are asking: Who is doing what and why? Frustrated Individual Contributors are asking: What am I doing and why? Death gives you the path to fully address the above two questions.Rumor has it that when business guru Peter Drucker was on his deathbed, someone asked him, what is the most important question in business? He supposedly replied, Who is doing what? Such a simple question and yet it has never been more difficult to answer. Obviously this query implies others. Even in Drucker's time, it could have been expanded to: Who is doing what, with whom, for whom, how, and why? These days, we must also add, ...using what software, on what platforms, as part of what teams, through what communication channels, after which meetings... ad infinitum. Modern day business guru Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach(TM) teaches entrepreneurs that the key to their time freedom and ultimate success is to think Who not How first. He couples this thinking with a tool he calls his Impact Filter that gives the Who a well thought out reason that the Who can intellectually and emotionally buy in to and figure out how to do it. The Who, in our model is the Individual Contributor who is moved toward cognizance via Sullivan's Impact Filter which basically outlines the Purpose of the Position the IC is getting ready to take on. The old question, like the classic Organizational Chart, gets to something vital, but in a way that misses the ever more complicated reality of 21st century organizations. Not only has Who is doing what? turned into an incredibly complex question, What am I doing and why? has become a painfully difficult one for workers to answer.
My goal here is to provide an approach and a set of tools that allow both leaders and Individual Contributors (ICs) to answer these extended Drucker questions honestly and completely. My aim is fourfold:
To help people understand organizational complexity - the messy complicated reality, not the neat simplicity portrayed in Org Charts. To provide a clear foundation for working within this complexity by supplementing your thinking with a 21scentury Organizational Cognizance Model. Introduce a software approach to augment your 2-D Org Chart with a dynamic, interactive 3-D Organizational Graph that allows one to capture and visualize the complex. Finally, to provide thinking tools and facilitation examples that help organizations get buy-in, build clarity, transparency, and, ultimately, Organizational Cognizance into their companies. What is Organizational Cognizance? As anyone familiar with the word cognizance might guess, it has lots to do with awareness and knowledge, but my use of the term also hearkens back to an earlier definition related to concepts of belonging and connectivity. In the days of knights and heraldry, a cognizance was a distinguishing mark or emblem worn by retainers, members of a noble house, to indicate their firm allegiance to it, a sign of their belief, a sign that they belonged, fit, and were connected. Organizational Cognizance is about building awareness and knowledge for Individual Contributors and helping them, their fellow team members, and leaders to understand precisely how they are connected to others and to the organization at a fine level, where they fit and how they belong. If we had to write an equation for Organizational Cognizance,
About the Author: Walt's clients say he brings two Unique Abilities to the table. 1: The ability connect with a team, take them into the future. and then help them map a path back to the present. Connecting with CEOs, Owners and Sr. Leadership Teams, taking them into the future, and then helping them map a path back to the present where they execute to create perpetual momentum is one of Walt's gifts. Clay G - CEO 2: The ability to see patterns and connections others do not see, and then communicate, model and codifying them into usable tools and methods that can be repeated creates real-world value. Walt has an uncanny ability to see the unseen, describing it in words, drawings and models; bringing the invisible out into the open where it can be understood, worked on, made actionable.
A life of observing, coaching, systemizing and improving shared with you. Always helping, always coaching. Walt has been coaching individual contributors and teams since he founded his first company, Layline.com in 1986. In 2006 he sold Layline and founded Smart-State.com where he focused on coaching CEOs and Business Owners in the art of Strategic Thinking. 2008 he switched to exclusively coaching Sr. Leadership Teams when he founded waltbrown.co and hung his shingle as a full-time EOS(R) Implementer. EOS(R) is the Operational cornerstone of the 7Q7P(TM) Momentum Machine(TM) 2017 he published his first book with Forbesbooks, The Patient Organization describing the 7 Question 7 Promise Culture and Engagement Framework(TM). TPO is the Culture and Engagement cornerstone of the 7Q7P(TM) Momentum Machine(TM). 2020 he published Death of the Org Chart describing the Organizational Cognizance Model(TM) and the 14Pt Checklist(TM) the Organizational Structure and design cornerstone of the 7Q7P(TM) Momentum Machine(TM), 2020 he launched OGraph.io a SaaS software company based on graph database science, to capture the organizational structure and design work he is teaching inside his book Death of the Org Chart.
A couple of Walt's Belief Statements. #1: Your company is a fiction. An organization, your company, is a fiction that is only given meaning and power by those who buy-in. If you have 100 people and 49 buy-in to this, and 51 buy-in to that, then you have two organizations, and you have already been divided and are on your way to being conquered. #2: We must have clarity and consistency in three areas of an organization for it to compete as a unit. Everyone must be bought-in. In order to create buy-in we must have clarity and consistency in three areas, operational, cultural and structural. These are the three components of the Momentum Machine. #3: Leadership is future alignment. You know you are leading when you experience another person aligning or turning over all or part of their future with your future. You will know it when it happens, you can feel it.
Walt works in a human laboratory. Working exclusively with senior leadership teams. Since 2008, Walt has averaged more than 130 days a year sequestered in session rooms, facilitating senior leadership teams as they do the gutsy work of improving their organizations. Walt calls this his laboratory - it is where the patterns are seen, where the discoveries are made and tested. His work focuses on diving deep with companies and nonprofits, helping them create Cultural clarity and consistency, Structural clarity and consistency, and Operational clarity and consistency.
Bio: He started his work-life as an accounting and statistics guy with the CPA firm now called E&Y. He then founded four companies, selling all four in 2006 after twenty years at the helm, leaving that orbit and moving to his current coaching and facilitation orbit. Walt is based in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, where he lives with his wife of 35 years, Anne, an attorney by profession, who raised two daughters, Jane and Marion, with very little meaningful help from Walt. Jane is a Chemical and Biolo
